I’ve traveled through the avocado growing areas of Michoacán. There are endless hillside covered with groves of the Haas variety. The climate is relatively cool and constant because of the altitude and being south of the Tropic of Cancer which tends to lead to year round production. Chile is different because it’s south of the equator and has the opposite production period compared to the US. The market used to be dominated by the Fuerte variety, which produces fruit in the winter, but this variety is gone from the market.

The avocado has its origin in Mexico and Guatemala. I’ve read in Mexican reports that the avocado is extinct in the wild. One still finds other varieties in Mexico, usually just called “criollo,” meaning locally native, but these are fast disappearing. For me the real problem is the monoculture and risk that certain genetic characteristics in other varieties will be lost.

My personal theory is that the indigenous people of Mexico invented guacamole as a way to prolong the consumption of avocados, which have a tendency to bruise easily and take on a rancid taste as the oil content rises at maturity. Guacamole is a great way to disguise this. It takes a fine avocado at its prime maturity to eat it plain out of the the rind. Now we have a triumph of native inventiveness and modern marketing. All I can say is, “¡Viva el aquacate!”

I do think that the NAFTA shift made avocadoes a great deal more visible and available, so it was both more possible and desirable to use them in snacks in or informal party foods (and not just the fancy crab dip at White House dinners). But that can’t be the whole story of how it became a January/February event food–even Mexican avocadoes are less plentiful in the winter than in the summer, although they do grow all year. I don’t really have an answer to that either, but I do think it’s a demand partly driven by the market, not just created by the marketers.